The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane (15 page)

I saw Jocelyn out with a flashlight and the puppy. “Out and about at this hour? But
they
have doors in their rooms,” I said, greatly disgruntled, and fell asleep, exhausted by my unsuccessful attempt to find a door.

 

JOCELYN

“T
HIS PUPPY THING
is not going to work,” I said out loud as I crossed the meadow with the puppy leaping around and straining at the leash. “I need a dog. I wonder how long it takes a puppy to turn into a dog? Probably too long for our purposes. Why did Humdinger get me a puppy? I asked for a dog.” I was talking feverishly to myself. I had discovered that that was what I did when fearful. When I awoke and was alone in the train car, the car leaning on its side, the outside full of fire, I called for my mother and, when no one answered, started walking slowly down the empty train corridor. At some point I started talking to myself, gibbering away a mile a minute, things like “I do not know what I will find. I do not like this all the people are gone and there should be people why did no one come and get me what are those fires out the window they are probably not something very bad.” I kept it up until I saw the first body parts, and after that I did not talk again for a very long time. Now I was in the dark again talking to myself, and I wondered if I would always be in the dark feverishly talking to myself from now on.

I had never liked being out at this hour, especially not alone. But Meline hadn't lifted her head or even awakened from her sick sleep any of the times I went into her room to peer anxiously at her. I had been hoping that if I spoke to Meline, she would beg me to wait until she was well enough to join me in the hunt for airplane parts, but for three days Meline had been so sick that it was apparent that she wouldn't be able to communicate with me at all for a while and that it was now up to me. I didn't really believe we would find all the airplane parts we needed, and didn't believe that even if we did, Meline could actually build a plane, but I needed that bit of hope and I needed to be convinced over and over. With Meline ill, I did not have this luxury. I had to believe on my own. And I wasn't sure I could. I didn't really understand why we were building the plane in the first place. Meline was so intent on it, she could make me believe in it, too. But without Meline, I wasn't sure what we were doing to begin with. Tonight, in the dark, it just seemed daft. And the puppy wasn't helping.
He
was supposed to be protecting
me,
but now I found myself worried that a bull would eat him. Did bulls eat small animals?

“I'm going to have to go farther afield, away from the house, and then what?” I said. Uncle might not believe in the bull, but Humdinger was more reliable than Uncle when it came to, well, almost anything. “I'll never find the airplane parts. But on the other hand, if I don't look, what will I do with my time? Alone, rattling around that house with nothing but my thoughts. What will I do at night except dream?” The puppy gave a great tug on the leash. I lost my grip and it raced off. “Oh no. Is it chasing something? Would a puppy be stupid enough to chase a bull? Probably. This on top of everything else. Now I won't be able to go back until I find the puppy. I can't leave a puppy out in the rain. And a puppy is going to be even harder to find than airplane parts because it doesn't reflect light. I haven't even named it yet. If I call ‘puppy,' will it come? Why should it? I'm not the one who feeds it. It will run off and get gored. And why do bulls have to go around goring everything? What kind of life is that, to be born wanting to snort and ram everything with your horns? No wonder there are bullfights. As far as I am concerned, that is the bull's fault.”

I walked on, straining to hear any sound at all over the rain. “And now I won't know whether a sound I hear is a bull in the bushes or a puppy. I can't run from rustling sounds either in case it
is
the puppy. This is precisely why you should never take on the care of a small defenseless animal. What I really had in mind was a large, mean Doberman. Why did I think I wanted a hound? What good would a hound do in an emergency? Howl the bull to death? But even a hound makes more sense than a puppy. It was very ill thought out on Humdinger's part. I would go back and tell him right now except I'm soaking wet and—” I cried out. My flashlight picked up the gleam of something in the bush and my first thought was that it was two staring bull's eyes. “Bull's eyes, bull's-eyes.” I fled back across the furrows, getting my feet caught in holes and falling over mounds, scrambling back up without even registering I had fallen. “Bull's-eyes, where had I seen them? Oh yes, target and archery classes. Targets are so hard to hit. They place them against hay bales. Hay bales would be sodden in this rain. Good thing Saskatchewan doesn't get rain like this, but I'll never live in Saskatchewan again. I hadn't thought of that before. I am
never
going home.”

I stopped, as if this thought had activated brakes in my legs, and I stood with my mouth open in the pouring rain, tears flowing down. I was
never
going home. There was no home. I started running again, fleeing the thought, but my foot caught and I tripped and the wind was knocked out of me. Blissfully, I could think of nothing for several moments but getting my breath back. When I got it back and nothing came galloping out of the dark to gore me, I realized it hadn't been eyes I had seen. It was metal. I had run all the way across the field from the thing I was seeking.

 

MELINE

T
HE NEXT MORNING
when Jocelyn knocked on my door I could see that she was relieved to find me awake. She dragged something into the room that was covered in an old ripped sheet.

“Look what I found,” she said proudly.

I sat up excitedly. “I can't believe you found something on your own.”

“Yes, of course I did,” said Jocelyn, sounding irritated.

“Well, you shouldn't be dragging it inside where everyone is going to see it. Why didn't you just leave it in the barn?”

“Because I knew you'd want to know what it was and I don't know how to describe it.” She took the sheet off.

“Oh,” I said. I could see her problem. It was part of a horizontal stabilizer, but so twisted it was practically unrecognizable. “Well, put it in the barn and we'll see about straightening it out later. It's a stabilizer.”

“I'm leaving it here. I'll take it out to the barn tonight. I just want to go to bed.”

“You were out all night until you found this?” I asked because frankly this didn't sound much like Jocelyn. It was more her speed to go out for ten minutes, decide it was too wet, and come in for hot chocolate and cookies.

“I found this almost immediately. I spent nearly the rest of the night afterward looking for the darned puppy.”

“Can we say ‘darned' if we can't say ‘crap'?” She looked at me with a stricken face but I was too ill to care. I did not want new friends. I did not want new beginnings.

 

MARTEN KNOCKERS

I
PASSED
J
OCELYN
looking like a drowned rat as usual. Well, if she would go out in the rain at all hours. She squinted at me with something like disdain when I spilled my tea. I was trying to walk down the hall with a cup of tea in one hand while reading a book with the other; periodically I would slosh tea and then stop and wipe it up with the corner of my dressing gown. But apparently she wasn't a girl who properly appreciated the multiple uses of a dressing gown. I had bought myself a deep plum velvet one and some carpet slippers and fancied I looked very distinguished and Victorian. I was practically a Christmas ornament myself! Every time I wiped up tea I'd ask, “What are all these scratch marks all over everything? There are grooves in the floor like someone was dragging something. Why would they do that? It's that Mendelbaum woman. Oooo, I must give her my list of Christmas goodies to bake.” I marched immediately upstairs to Mrs. Mendelbaum's bedroom and knocked on her door.

“Loz mich tzu ru. Go away, I'm busy being sick,” said Mrs. Mendelbaum.

“What in the world is that?” It looked as if she was happily drinking a bottle of shoe polish.

“My friend Sophie sends me six bottles of her cough medicine when she sends my things. A secret recipe from the shtetl. So, does she think I am going to spend my days coughing? But she says all the women in the shtetl keep it so on their shelves. For emergencies. For their nerves. For childbirth. Who should have such nerves?”

“Really, I wouldn't if I were you, Mrs. Mendelbaum. You never know what's in these herbal doodads. Not regulated.”

“I should cough myself into a coma? Go away, I am sick.”

“Yes, I know you're sick
now,
Mrs. Mendelbaum, but you don't plan to be sick the week before Christmas, do you? When you
should
be cooking.”

“How should I know?” asked Mrs. Mendelbaum. “Now I am sick. Later, who can say? Do you think this is sickness that I want? Who would want such a thing?”

“Oh dear,” I said. You just never knew what was going to set her off. “I don't mean to inconvenience you, but you don't really mind cooking when you're sick, do you? I've bought a goose.”

“A goose. You want me to cook a goose?”

“Well, it isn't very good raw, I would imagine.”

“How do I know now whether or not I will be too sick to cook a goose when the time comes?”

“Well, you can't be sick forever, I mean, can you?”

“Az a yor ahf mir, Mr. Smarty Pants.”

I really hated it when she called me Mr. Smarty Pants. It seemed to me that if someone was paying you for doing nothing but lying around being sick, the least you could do was not call him names.

“Well, you could, um, you could RALLY! That's what you could do, Mrs. Mendelbaum. People do rally. They rally all the time. They rally do. Hahaha. Or you could cook while sick. I suppose people must do that, too. Especially people who live alone. Otherwise they would all die, wouldn't they?”

“What? Cook when I'm sick? You should eat food cooked by a sick person? And for Christmas? Who knows from cooking geese? A nice chicken maybe and a few latkes.”

“I don't even know what those are,” I said briskly. “Anyhow, I've made a very careful list of just the right kind of Christmas foods. The goose, of course, we've already discussed that.” Discussing the menu made me feel like the lord of the manor. Usually these days I felt completely out of control in my own house. It irked me. “Chestnut stuffing, sweet potatoes, Brussels sprouts amandine, a plum pudding, a trifle, and a bûche de noël. I'm not married to the Brussels sprouts amandine. You could do them up any way you like. With mint, for instance. There's someplace I've left you scope for imagination, Mrs. Mendelbaum, if that gives you any pleasure.”

“Why should Brussels sprouts give me pleasure? Lying on a desert island having my toes sucked, that should give me pleasure, too, I suppose.”

“Please, Mrs. Mendelbaum, let's try to focus on the menu,” I said.

“These starlets, with their fancy-shmancy pedicures, so they should lie in the sand having their toes sucked. This is a life?”

“Please,” I repeated. It seemed that not only would Mrs. Mendelbaum not cook, she wouldn't even talk about it.

“My friend Sophie sends me movie magazines. Such things to amuse me when I'm ill. Humdinger brings them to me. Go to a hospital, Zisel, she begs me.”

“You're not thinking of leaving us, are you, Mrs. Mendelbaum?” I asked worriedly. “Before cooking Christmas dinner?”

“And what's all this about bushes? Making a bush? You want me to cook a bush? What kind of strange goyishe rite is this?” croaked Mrs. Mendelbaum, putting her hands to her ears, but appearing to talk more to herself than to me. “The waltzes have begun again in my ears. Oh, please go away. I hear Viennese waltzes again. Ach, go, go. A kabaret forshtelung in my head. Go.”

“Poor woman is delirious,” I said to myself, going out and closing the door and then, on second thought, sliding my menu under it. She could study it in her own time.

 

MRS. MENDELBAUM

A
M
I
GOING CRAZY
? I think I am better becoming, my fever, it has gone, and just a bit of the cough left, and I begin to see him, my Ansel, my gelibteh, and the café in Vienna where we met. I do not mean I imagine such things, that I see them in my mind's eye and my memory. No, to me they become real. My bedroom becomes the café and there I sit, young, stylish, in my new black skirt and the black stockings with the clocks on them. Oh such stockings, I have not had a pair like them since. Vienna then was what, so full of intrigue. Such a place. Like overripe fruit, it smells of things that are too much, too easily gotten by some, the table full of fruit that rots because the ones who are allowed it have more than even their appetites will allow for. It frightens my mother, I see, this Vienna, but I am young, I am aware, but it does not seem that anything could happen to the young like me.

And as I see the café again, so clearly, I begin to think as I have not for so many years, in German again. It was skating on thin ice to go to the café alone like this with my cigarettes and coffee. There was talk that I would not be allowed to do so much longer. That even if such a thing were not declared, I might disappear and no one in the police would bother to find out how. Like playing in traffic, was what it was. After your mother had told you not to. That's why it was so exciting, of course. But it wasn't really as exciting as it could have been because I wasn't pretty enough to be taken much notice of and I didn't dare wear the kind of makeup that would have made me more noticeable and my hair was all wrong. It still hung all the way down my back, and even if I put it up it didn't have the look of the sophisticated new perms. All it said about me was newly out of mama's house but not really a woman yet, not interesting, not even really that pretty. Just young and innocent, which attracted certain types, but I could always tell the types, they always approached as if their own black clouds of intentions pulsed like heartbeats beneath the surface, they were rotting in their own ways, and when I saw them coming, I quickly sent them on their way.